The grounds for which people have been transported to the Solovky are so various, and very often so completely baseless, that one cannot help supposing them to be pure inventions of the Tchekist "jurisprudence."
For example, among the prisoners there is the aged Countess Frederiks. During the war, as a Red Cross nurse, the old lady performed admirable service in tending wounded officers and men. And now, in the camp, she receives no parcels from the Red Cross, gives what help she can to the sick, and lives in a state of permanent semi-starvation, ceaselessly subjected to jeers and insults. She was transported for no other reason than that she had the misfortune to be the sister of Count Frederiks, who was Minister of the Imperial Court under the murdered Tsar, and was well-known as an intimate counsellor of Nicholas II. And while she was sent to the Solovky, the Count himself, a very old man of nearly a hundred, was until lately living in freedom in Petrograd; only quite recently was he given permission to leave for Finland.
In one of the cells on Solovetsky Island (the so-called Women's Building) the wife of a prominent minister of the old regime is perishing of under-nourishment and unaccustomed hard bodily labour. The official note of the decision in her case ran: "Transported to the Solovky for five years, as being the wife of a minister of Bloody Nicholas!" The minister himself fills a conspicuous post at Moscow under the Soviet Government!
A locksmith named Timoshenko was sent from Voronesh to the Solovky for two years. He was a simple workman and had had nothing whatever to do with politics. He continually endeavoured to obtain from Vasko an answer to his question — for what offence he had been sent to a concentration camp. Not till 1925, when his term of two years expired, was he accused of belonging to the "Savinkoff counter-revolutionary organisation" and sent to cool his heels for three years more in the Narym region.
At the same time other "Savinkoffists" were sent to the Solovky from Novokhopersk, a district town in the Government of Voronesh. They were: Vrashnikoff, former agent of Count Vorontsoff-Dashkoff's property in the Caucasus; Savinoff, a technician; Krivjakin, the business manager of a Soviet institution, and others. To these were added an engineer named Novitsky, from the Government of Poltava, and a crowd of peasants from the Government of Voronesh. Many of the peasants, when told at the Solovky that they were charged with complicity in "Savinkoff's conspiracy," asked doubtfully:
"Savinkoff?[[25]] Who's he? A general?"
When I was in the Solovky, one Epstein arrived there; he had been sentenced to three years. When he asked why he had been transported, he received from the examining judge the answer:
"Because you're a business man!"
Exactly the same answer was received by another criminal, a Jew tailor named Gurieff, who kept a ready-made clothes shop. (He is now in charge of the tailors' workshop in the Kem camp.)
Not long ago two Poles, named Minitch and Vintovsky, fled to Russia from Poland. The frontier authorities gave a ceremonial reception to the men, who had "escaped from cruel imprisonment by the Polish Pans," but the Moscow Gpu sent them to the Solovky for three years. The two Poles are now cursing the day when they decided to cross the frontier of the "freest Government in the world!"